“Mike? Welcome! Where is your luggage?” “This is it. Let’s Go!”
…a week in a thin briefcase…
While we had lost the funding for the full solution, building a card for the PS/2 was well within our scope and budget, and we were lucky. The core idea was to demonstrate that with more than one processor, you speed things up faster than waiting for the silicon chips to get faster.
In my networking, I had found a guy in the Winchester Scientific Center in the UK that had built almost exactly what we were looking for. Again pre-everything, at least I could correspond with him through our internal email system, and he was flying in from Winchester England.
…the right partners for the second album…
Nothing like a Platinum initial album to ratchet up the pressure on the follow-up album. Many artists first are amazing… because it took them 10 years to put it together. Cranking out the next one, in less than a year, with a lot of people now watching causes many second albums to be less “great”.
Carlos had put together the right partners after changing out a few partners during the recording of Santana 1, and now they had played together in many concerts and were able to quickly put together an album that would ultimately be 207 on the Greatest Albums List.
They also featured cover art that was amazing, a painting called Annunciation by German-French painter Mati Klarwein, one of his first paintings upon arriving in the US in 1961… and hung on many young men’s walls from the obvious references 😉
The second album is where you find out who your partners really are.
…a vendor outside Pittsburgh…
… how he fit the hardware and the clothes for a week in that briefcase I never understood, but we were off to meet with some of the US-based engineering team to talk through his design approach. It was amazingly simple and straight forward, and the mechanical and electrical design documents were very complete. While very skeptical that 1 guy could do all of this on his own, we were able to convince our partners that this was likely the best shot we had.
Luckily our leader had been building “commercial” hardware with a trusted vendor just outside of Pittsburgh, and soon we were visiting them to get bids on both fabricating the circuit cards, but also assembling the finished products. Their quotes are 2 orders of magnitude cheaper… and that was exactly what our Division President wanted… for OUR facility to get that capability in place… to be that “lean” to use a modern team.
…2 orders of magnitude, and a strained partnership…
Reluctantly they agreed to match the price, and we were forced to have the cards built “in house” but we held the ground on the external vendor building the circuit cards, a decision that would eventually cause the partnerships to be strained. Our first copy of the design was produced, and I carried it and an engineer with me to Winchester… outside of London, for the initial debug.
…one partner for change, and one not…
The US engineer was NOT excited to be “chosen” for this assignment and kept asking “where can I get a hamburger?”… literally being the prototypical Ugly American. I had to interface between him and Mike so that neither would kill the other, and prevent any Hope of transferring the knowledge back to our team.
That eventually ended up as the W4 MultiProcessor Adapter… something we referred to in the post. I have lost track of both Mike and the other engineer. I continue to think a lot about the Hope of that era – that we could come up with something innovative, we could change the market, and thus change IBM.
Specifically it was a great time to see how Hope powers start-ups – the idea that you can be an order of magnitude better – that you can get other businesses to take a risk with you. It precedes Change that will be the following week. That processing approach has been replaced by the current Nvidia cult – using a different approach to computing but one that has completely changed the world. So the Hope was real – the timing and the company (IBM) were wrong.
As we continue to think about Hope, what is it that you want and need in a partner… and have you ever written that down? I hadn’t, and this was a great awakening for me to realize that it is SO critical to success to have partners that are easy to work with AND share your outlook on the Hope and the future. Here in my partners I had one interested in change, and one was not. The song for today means literally “Do you feel my rhythm?”… a Tito Puente tune that Santana recorded because “it was easy to dance to”. What is the rhythm that you want to have partners align with… and Oye Como Va?
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: Write down the 3 things you need from a partner, then send the list to the one you are working with now and ask for theirs.
If the list shows a gap you would rather not face alone, let’s partner on it. Schedule time with me here.
Find the ones who feel your rhythm, and dance to… Oye Como Va
